#schurrle

(About the importance of Mario's return) 

André :"his turn is very, very important I see myself not only on the court with him. He knows how he has to make allusion to me, he knows my race routes. Just for me, but for the whole team. " ... "We played together I think in Mainz in just 20 minutes Actually, sad, right?" We've already talked about it and this is crazy. In January or February, when Marco returns after his injury, he will be nothing more ...

 (about the possibility of them returning to play in the summer in the world cup)

Ex-Chelsea and Fulham star Schurrle told to find a new club as he nears transfer to Spartak Moscow – The Sun

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EX-CHELSEA and Fulham star Andre Schurrle is close to joining Spartak Moscow as Borussia Dortmund step up their summer reshuffle.

Germany winger Schurrle is reportedly free to find a new club after the Bundesliga runners-up left him out of a training camp in Switzerland.

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Andre Schurrle, whose loan spell at Fulham failed to keep them up, now faces leaving his parent club Borussia…

The final verdict on Andre Schürrle

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This will be the first article of “Final Verdict”, the focus of this is to analyze how our loanees fared this season and if they should stay. This article will talk about André Schürrle and his journey in the Premier League and whether he has a future at Borussia Dortmund. Move to Borussia Dortmund

André Schürrle’s Borussia Dortmund career kicked off with enormous expectations in the…

The afternoon sky is azure blue in south west London but the chill in the air permeates every corner of Motspur Park, the one-time athletics ground which is Fulham’s base.

Training would be done by now, had the season taken its anticipated course, but there have been double sessions all week. There’s a restless, nervous energy. It’s 1.30pm and Andre Schurrle will soon be heading back to the gym.

The German has brought Fulham the full technical component you would expect of a World Cup winner these past five months, such as the goal at Burnley last Saturday — a 30-yard high pass brought out of the sky with his right boot and immediately hammered in off the upright.

But the team are second bottom and struggling — for points, for leadership, for any material sense of a plan.

Schurrle, who was setting up Germany’s World Cup winner for Mario Gotze in Rio a little more than four years ago, does not deny that he is in alien territory.

‘That’s true. That’s true,’ he says, taking a chair in one of the warren of rooms in the elegant 1920s building. ‘It’s not easy to adapt to losing a lot. This didn’t happen in my career yet. It’s a completely new situation for me. Completely new pressure.’

He pauses, raking through his mind for some kind of symmetry between his early days at little Bundesliga club Mainz, a decade ago, and the experience of facing Tottenham Hotspur at Craven Cottage this weekend, in a team who have won one game in 10.‘Maybe it is quite similar, it is quite similar,’ he says, warming to the idea. ‘You go as a little team playing against the big teams not expecting to win big. You always have this little thing in your head that if everything goes right you can make a big surprise.’ But Mainz, managed by Thomas Tuchel, finished ninth in Schurrle’s early season.

‘It hasn’t come off for us yet this season,’ he says. ‘We’ve struggled big time against big teams. So it’s all new. And new things can bring something positive.’

The problem for Fulham is that too much is new. Schurrle arrived as part of a £125milion whirl of transfer activity last summer, which blew away some of the cornerstones of the side who had won promotion.

Now, as Claudio Ranieri settles in as manager, another round of buying is under way. Ryan Babel, last known here as the Dutch prodigy who failed to make good on promise at Liverpool, has arrived from Besiktas, aged 32.

No one really knows if anything other than his hairstyle — shaven eight years ago, bright red now — has changed. He has wandered the world since Anfield.

Lost in this frenzy seems any sense of a Fulham old guard, leaders or players who can tell the rest what makes Fulham tick.

‘Yes that’s fair,’ Schurrle says. ‘That’s fair. It’s like we had a little bit of a struggle, maybe still have a little bit of a struggle, to find a hierarchy in the team. The few players everybody looks up to and the rest can follow.

‘I think it’s quite normal with a team that lost a lot of games and has been in a rebuilding process.

‘They had a very good team spirit and it’s not easy to build this back up.’

There have been moments when Schurrle, who is on a two-year loan from Borussia Dortmund, has assumed that mantle. His candour at Burnley, where Fulham conspired to lose to a team who did not manage a shot on goal, was welcome.‘We are deep, deep, deep in trouble,’ he said late that night. Yet he does not claim to possess the leadership qualities which seem to be a requirement if Fulham are to drag themselves out of the state they’re in.

‘In my previous clubs, there were players who were there a long time, the leaders of the club,’ he says. ‘So you come in and try to fit in. Obviously with my experience there’s an expectation of me leading a little bit.

‘But I wouldn’t say I’m the big leader who shouts a lot. I’m the guy who tries with my qualities to help on the field. Obviously, I talk to young players and help them a little bit with my experience. But it’s not that I’m this figure who stands up and shouts a lot.’

The individual sharing these thoughts does not, for all the present uncertainty, look a player in a pit of despair. He returned home to Germany from England four years ago because his confidence had been shredded by Jose Mourinho, who didn’t play him at Chelsea.

‘I wasn’t in a good place there because I didn’t have much time or much trust from the manager,’ he reflects. But after a successful spell at Wolfsburg, two years at Dortmund were unremittingly tough, bringing three goals and an unforgiving response from the Yellow Wall of supporters. ‘We’ll drink until Schurrle scores’ was one of the chants.

Schurrle speaks of the difficult relationship that can exist between fans and players in Germany. ‘It’s a big jealousy thing that you have from fans — not the hard-core fans because they always stand behind their team. But it’s not easy, especially for a German national team player who did great things in the past and maybe is struggling.’

London is the release from that, the city he loved first time round, when he pursued his interest in cuisine — discovering Jak’s on Walton Street, Cut at 45 Park Lane, Tsukiji Sushi at The Westbury, and Nobu on Berkeley Street. He grew up in a working-class family in the provincial city of Ludwigshafen and was always struck by the variety London offered.

It’s a different, smaller kind of home he has here this time — a rented house in Fulham — but his Instagram post proclaiming the find seemed to reflect a wish to be part of the community which Fulham brings.

Fulham fans have not yet taken to calling him ‘Shirley’ as the Chelsea contingent did, but he’s more likely to encounter them while walking down the street.

‘When we’ve had big losses, they still want to talk,’ he says. ‘It’s quite special. I don’t think it’s like this at a lot of clubs, where you lose a lot and the fans are still with you like this.’

It’s a different kind of Britain, five years on — a nation tearing itself apart over the majority’s wish to split from Europe and Schurrle clearly finds the fervour for Brexit as puzzling as many continental Europeans do.

‘I watch the news of that,’ he says. ‘I saw when I was making the move here that Britain might be going out of the EU. Obviously I think it’s the best the way it was. The way it was, it was good.‘Maybe some important people had a problem with that so they made a choice and I hope it will all work out. Hopefully it won’t change too many things.’

When he left England last time, Mourinho was in his pomp, though he is another who has gone. There was a time when the Portuguese was publicly denigrating Schurrle in that now-familiar way of his, when the player took to Instagram to profess his intention to stay and fight for his Chelsea place. But if he has any temptation to bask in the Portuguese’s fate, he is reining it in. ‘Everybody knows he has a lot of success in every club he’s been at,’ he says.

‘I don’t know what was inside the United squad so I can’t say much. But I just know that he is a manager who always wants to win and puts everything into that. I wish him well.’

At Fulham, the frustrations have revealed themselves in unusual ways. This was the week when tempers became frayed because one player, Aleksandar Mitrovic, wanted silence in a yoga session at Motspur Park, while another, Aboubakar Kamara, wanted to talk.

Schurrle sounds glad to have avoided that flashpoint, saying: ‘To be fair I wasn’t in there. I was with another group, so I can’t say much about it as it would be unfair on the other players.’

Defender Joe Bryan, who was present, says it was more disagreement than bust-up.There are bigger considerations, like whether Fulham have it in them to assimilate yet more new players as they embark on a policy of employing Premier League veterans — Gary Cahill, Danny Simpson and Danny Drinkwater if they have their way — to stay up.

‘We need quality,’ Schurrle says. ‘We had a lot of chances with this squad to win matches and we lost almost all of them. Obviously then something needs to change. We have a new manager, this is his first transfer period and he is obviously looking for players that he wants to play and work with.

‘Claudio has changed our way of playing and tried to be more defensive, to be more stable, to be more people behind the ball and work harder against the ball.

‘It’s way better, but obviously we need to have the balance. We are players who like to have the ball and that’s what we need to do so we can win matches. Hopefully that’s what we can find.’